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Protection, payback, or both? Emotional and motivational mechanisms underlying avoidance by victims of transgressions

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Abstract

In the wake of an interpersonal offense, victims often feel motivated to avoid their perpetrators, and the more severe the offense, the more pronounced this motivation is. On the surface, avoidance appears to serve a self-protective function such that victims, compelled by a sense of fear and apprehension, withdraw from their wrongdoers to prevent further harm. However, avoidance might also serve a retaliatory purpose in which victims shun their offenders out of anger and hostility, using interpersonal aloofness as a means of payback. In the present pair of studies, we examined victims’ self-reports of recent offense experiences and tested the mediating roles of fear and anger in the relationship between offense severity and avoidance motivations. Study 1 revealed that anger, not fear, was the emotion that mediated this relationship. Study 2 replicated this finding and also showed that the link between anger and avoidance was mediated both by revenge and self-protection motives, which demonstrates the complex nature of avoidance following a transgression.

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Notes

  1. To verify that this outcome was not the result of a violation of the homogeneity of variance assumption made by ordinary least squares regression, which the multiple mediator model relies on to estimate path weights, we examined the residuals for the paths leading to and from fear in the model and discovered that applying a monotonic transformation to both the offense severity and fear scale helped us better satisfy this assumption. Including these transformed values in the model did not alter the role of fear in the model, however; it remained a nonsignificant mediator of the severity-avoidance relationship, and the mediating function of anger remained intact.

  2. We relied on the AMOS program to perform the SEM analyses in both studies. Detailed information concerning the structural and measurement models we examined can be obtained from the first author.

  3. As in Study 1, we applied monotonic transformations to the offense severity and fear scales and reran the analysis to insure that fear did not fail to mediate the severity-avoidance association because of a violation of the homogeneity of residuals assumption. Modifying the analysis in this way produced no changes in the mediating role of fear; anger remained the only significant mediator.

  4. To further substantiate our conclusions, we reran the final multiple mediator model with participants’ TRIM Revenge scores substituted for their scores on the WOES and found parallel results. That is, both the TRIM Revenge (point estimate = 0.0931, 95% CI from 0.0293 to 0.2164) and self-protection scale (point estimate = 0.1390, 95% CI from 0.0306 to 0.2715) mediated the anger-avoidance association, and this mediation was full. Anger no longer predicted avoidance motivations with the mediators included in the model, β = 0.07, ns. Importantly, the contrast between the two meditation paths was nonsignificant (point estimate = −0.0459, 95% CI from −0.1814 to 0.0793). Thus, our results hold for both revenge scales. The zero-order correlation between the TRIM Revenge and WOES was strong and positive, r = 0.63, p < 0.001.

  5. The sadness scale was created by taking the average of participants’ current feelings of sadness, hurt, and depression related to their offenses (α = 0.86 in Study 1 and α = 0.87 in Study 2).

  6. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this article for bringing this possibility to our attention.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Oklahoma, 455 W. Lindsey Street, Dale Hall Tower, Room 705, Norman, OK, 73019-2007, USA

    Collin D. Barnes, Ryan P. Brown & Lindsey L. Osterman

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  1. Collin D. Barnes
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  2. Ryan P. Brown
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  3. Lindsey L. Osterman
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Correspondence to Ryan P. Brown.

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Barnes, C.D., Brown, R.P. & Osterman, L.L. Protection, payback, or both? Emotional and motivational mechanisms underlying avoidance by victims of transgressions. Motiv Emot 33, 400–411 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-009-9142-4

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